Tuesday, March 03, 2009

The Sexual Non-Paradox: Women Don't Have to Choose Like Men

Throughout The Sexual Paradox Susan Pinker addressed the economists' "gender paradox": as women's economic choices and achievements increase, they diverge more from men. Progressive opinion expected that we would come closer to a 50/50 division of all money and power positions by now. They thought women would, on average, make the same as men. But reality is not heading that way. Some aging liberationists think that sex discrimination must be the main cause.

Susan Pinker, and many others, are documenting that women do not make the same economic choices as men -- and that is fine. Moreover, she concludes, “Devaluing women’s preferences is an unintended aspect of expecting the sexes to be exactly the same.” The gender paradox is a paradox only if you deny sex differences. If we see that men and women, as a group, are different from one another and make different choices, then there is no paradox.